I freely admit that I stole this from Mike Rowe’s website…from a post titled “My One Cent”. For those of you who don’t know who he is…Mike was the host of a show named Dirty Jobs where he went around and did a whole lot of dirty, stinky, thankless jobs and made a TV show about it. He was way out in the hinterlands most of the time doing things ya never heard of…goose artificial inseminator, chicken gender evaluator, road kill picker-upper, and the like. He met what he called a lot of ‘real Americans’ who were interested in raising their kids and making their lives a little better than their parents were.

Anyway…there was this man who was elected as President of these United States and there were some things going on when he was elected…here are a few of them.

We were a nation divided over taxes, race relations, states rights, and the border

He was elected after a bitterly divided contentious campaign

The winning candidate was a Republican whom half the country despised and who thought he was going to lose

This Republican treated the press with contempt, vowed to restore the border, and vowed to transform the Supreme Court

This Republican was believed…by many citizens…to be on the wrong side of history

This man was thought…again by many citizens…to be a tyrant

He’s been declared to be unethical

He’s been declared to be an illegitimate President…then been attacked for defending himself against those claims

Nevertheless…he won the election fair and square…true he won less than half of the popular vote (which doesn’t matter anyway…we have the Electoral College)…but he carried 54% of the states and with their electoral votes the election

He’s been proclaimed as “the buffoon in then Oval Office” and “not my President”

He’s been accused of wanting to institute a police state where only white males are acceptable and all others are 2nd…or maybe even 3rd class citizens…or not even citizens at all

None of these facts are in question…so I ask you…who was this man…hold on…I’ll tellya in a minute.

Did I (well, Mike) intend for you to believe that he was writing about present day events? Did he want to play with your existing beliefs and biases…to juxtapose ironies and coincidences…to deliberately confuse the reader.

Of course he did…that was his whole point.

He was trying to compare the feelings of the country when that man was elected to the feelings of the country today…everything written above has been written about the man who will be sworn in as POTUS tomorrow Jan 20, 2017. He’s been called the next Hitler by many on the left…accused of destroying democracy (never mind that we don’t live in a democracy at all but in a Federated Democratic Republic where…according to the Constitution…all other powers not specifically vested in the federal government by the Constitution remain with the states…as we are after all the United States of America and not just America.)…the devil incarnate…an illegitimate President…and the list goes on and on.

Mike…naturally…received many negative emails about his podcast where he discussed this man…and hence wrote the My One Cent piece to explain. If you want to read them in the original form…take a look here. Speaking of podcasts…if you’re a fan of those sorts of things then you should check out “The Way I Heard It” which is available from his website or you favorite podcast aggregator. He’s a folksy guy who tells stories about people you might not recognize in 8 or 9 minutes…always entertaining and educating as well.

The man he was talking about in the podcast by the way…was not Donald J. Trump. I know you were convinced it was…but actually…his name was Abraham Lincoln…the 16th President of these United States and one thought by many on both the left and right as in the top 3 of best President ever.

He wasn’t comparing the two men…and by no means was insinuating that the 45th President will be better or worse than the 16th…but to state that the feelings amongst our citizens with being severely divided and not trusting the other side are very similar. How will the 45th President rank? Who knows…let’s wait and see.

OK, what else we been doing. Long story short…not too much.

Neil ordered us some new computer network stuff and the parts necessary to convert our DirectTV installation over from multi-wire mode to single wire mode…this will allow us to replace our 5 year old receiver/recorder with a new one that’s half the size, has twice the storage, and most importantly has 5 tuners instead of 2…this limitation has caused us (well, Connie actually as she’s in charge of what we watch, what we record and when we do either of those) no end of trouble. With only tuners…you can record 2 things simultaneously…or you can watch one and record one simultaneously but if things overlap you have to find other spots on the calendar when you can record things and have to contend with the frequent 1 minute overlap in the scheduled times on the DirectTV guide. Anyway…with 5 tuners in the Genie we’ll not have to worry about that.

Yesterday we got up early and drove up to Tampa to visit the Tampa RV Supershow…we’re not buying another rig…and didn’t bring home anything other than memories and good feelings from our visit with our friends Bill and Linda Napier. We wandered around the show awhile…picked apart the specs and capabilities of various RV brands that we don’t own, wandered through New Horizons latest model which is a Majestic like ours but is built as a travel trailer pulled by a bumper hitch rather than a 5th wheel. The guy that bought it wanted to carry a SmartCar on the deck of his truck and didn’t want to have a heavy duty truck which that normally requires…so with the help of a pre-existing design the Majestic travel trailer was born. Looks pretty nice both inside and out…and shorter than the Majestic 5ver is.

We had both lunch and an early dinner with them before heading home about 1700.

We worked twice in a row at the Elks for dinner…working both fish last Friday and chicken last Monday…and will do fish again tomorrow night.

Neil finished (almost) maintenance on our water systems…disinfected and sanitized the fresh tank and piping, replaced the anode in our water heater, and changed out all the filters except the one under the sink for the fridge and sink-side water dispenser.

On to interesting stuff…

Bill sent me this with a “Thinking of You” subject line.

Ya don’t see this every day…I just don’t know what to say.

Nope…absolutely not.

RVing at it’s best.

And finally…when your mechanic calls in two priests…just let it go and buy a new car.